When the System Cuts Deep: Black Maternal Trauma and the Theology That Listens Back

“I kept saying ‘I’m in pain, I’m in pain,’ but I was completely dismissed and fobbed off – no one looked at me,” recalled Tinuke Awe, a Black mother and campaigner, describing her near-death experience during childbirth in a Guardian article that sparked national concern.[1] Hers is not an isolated story. Black women in the UK are nearly three times more likely to die during childbirth than their white counterparts.[2] Behind this statistic are not just numbers, but stories of pain being ignored, symptoms dismissed, and trauma normalised. While public discourse treats this disparity as a health crisis, it is also a theological one. This article argues that the intersection of Womanist and Trauma Theology reframes survival, names rupture, and envisions theological repair, illuminating the crisis while demanding a reorientation of theological imagination and pastoral responsibility. Theology must confront, not merely reflect, the structural conditions that allow this disparity to persist.

Trauma is not just a fleeting crisis. It is a lasting emotional response to distress, a rupture tied to powerlessness that overwhelms ordinary coping systems.[3] For Black women in childbirth, trauma becomes not just medical but racialised, gendered, and spiritual. And it lingers; long after discharge, the wound persists. As Deacon Julius Lee reflects in relation to Hurricane Katrina, the storm may pass, but the “after the storm” remains.[4]

For many, theological platitudes like “God has a plan” do not heal; they harm. What is needed is not consolation but witness. As someone who has lived with chronic illness and experienced clinical dismissal, I recognise the spiritual fatigue that comes from being unheard. The rupture is not hypothetical. It’s something I carry. Rambo calls this lingering rupture ‘the middle space’, a suspended state between pain and healing, where traditional theological resolutions falter. It is in this space that my own spiritual exhaustion often dwells.[5]

Womanist theology, rooted in the voice and agency of Black women, reframes survival itself as sacred knowledge.[6] It is not a subset of Black or Feminist Theology; it corrects both. Yet even within Womanist theology, there are tensions; some voices centre maternal survival, others prioritise political resistance. This plurality is not a weakness but a strength, inviting theology to remain open-ended and responsive. Drawing authority from lived experience, it compels theology to stop theorising from above and begin listening from below.

One of the most piercing theological accounts of this reality comes from Delores Williams. In Sisters in the Wilderness, she rereads the biblical figure of Hagar, a woman forced to bear a child for someone else’s benefit and then cast out. When God tells Hagar to “return and submit”, Williams argues that even the divine appears complicit in a theology of endurance, not liberation.[7] Today, Black women are returned to clinical systems that misread risk, delay care, and still expect their trust.[8]

But Williams insists survival is not silence. Reflecting on what she calls “genocidal white oppression”, she describes endurance as an act of defiance, a revolutionary refusal to disappear.[9] This framework is not only historical; it speaks urgently to the present. For Black women in maternity wards, survival becomes sacred not because it redeems harm, but because it insists life, embodied and unyielding, persists in defiance of it and refuses to be erased.

Trauma theology deepens this framework by naming the rupture, insisting that faith must dwell in brokenness, not rush toward resolution. Karen O’Donnell argues trauma “requires a rethinking of the virtue of hope”, particularly for those living through chronic, unresolved harm.[10] Not all theologians reject the redemptive arc; Serene Jones, for instance, argues that trauma can coexist with a transformed sense of divine presence.[11] But such hope must be earned, not assumed.

Darryl Stephens offers that witness. In his trauma-informed approach to ethics, he describes how the moral agency of survivors is strengthened through communities that bear witness to their pain.[12] This is a theological correction to the silencing of Black women in obstetric care. It reframes them not as passive victims but as active moral agents whose survival demands to be recognised, not dismissed or romanticised.

To this end, Womanist theology urges us to value the “underside”, the perspectives of those who have long been marginalised by both theology and society.[13] It is not merely about adding new stories to old frameworks; it’s about transforming the framework entirely. As Rambo puts it, trauma is not a detour on the map of faith; it rewrites the map itself.[14]

This theological reconstruction matters not just in theory, but in practice. A trauma-informed church would not spiritualise maternal suffering. It would train chaplains to hear embodied pain, preach sermons that centre survival, and challenge the structures, medical and theological, that make certain women disposable. “A trauma-informed church”, O’Donnell writes, “will, by necessity, produce trauma-informed pastoral care.”[15] That necessity is now.

None of this is neutral. Theology that ignores racialised maternal trauma reinforces the very systems it claims to transcend. And theology that dares to bear witness must be brave enough to name not just suffering but the systems that create it. In the end, Black maternal trauma is not a fringe issue. It is a theological crisis. And if theology cannot speak to this, if it cannot grieve, rage, and remake itself, then perhaps it has nothing left to say.

---

Notes and References

[1] Topping, A., 2020. ‘“Something has to be done”: tackling the UK’s Black maternal health problem’, The Guardian, 2 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/oct/02/something-has-to-be-done-tackling-the-uks-black-maternal-health-problem (Accessed: 9 October 2025).

[2] MBRRACE-UK (2024) Saving Lives, Improving Mothers’ Care: Lessons learned to inform maternity care from the UK and Ireland Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths and Morbidity 2020–22. Oxford: National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford, p. 9.

[3] Herman, J. (2011) ‘The Aftermath of Violence: Trauma and Recovery’, in Carrington, K.L. and Griffin, S. (eds.) Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 69–76.

[4] Rambo, S. (2015) ‘Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining’, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, 69(1), p. 8.

[5] Rambo, S. (2015), p. 13.

[6] Hayes, D.L. (2024) ‘Womanist Theology’, in Wolfe, B.N. et al. (eds.) St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. Available at: https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/WomanistTheology (Accessed: 24/04/2025).

[7] Williams, D.S. (1993) Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, p. 21.

[8] MBRRACE-UK (2024), p. 12.

[9] Williams, D.S. (1993), p. 131.

[10] O’Donnell, K. (2023) ‘Trauma Theology’, in Wolfe, B.N. et al. (eds.) St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. Available at: https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/TraumaTheology (Accessed: 24/04/2025), p. 14.

[11] Jones, S. (2009) Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

[12] Stephens, D. (2022) Bearing Witness: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Christian Ethics. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, p. 156.

[13] Douglas, K.B. (2001) ‘Marginalized people, liberating perspectives: A womanist approach to Biblical interpretation’, Anglican Theological Review, 83(1), p. 46.

[14] Rambo, S. (2015), p. 15.

[15] O’Donnell, K. (2023), p. 19.

---

© Gessica Arthur, 2026. This article is a part of a series in collaboration with the FTN (Feminist Theology Network). FTN social media: https://www.instagram.com/feministtheologynetwork/ and @feministtheology.bsky.social

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: Mustafa Omar, Silhouette of Pregnant Woman, Nairobi, Kenya (2019). Free to use under the Unsplash License.
.